@@ Saddam apologist turned anti-Saddam @@
Arash
July 5, 2004
Did one woman's obsession take America to war?
She is a conspiracy theorist whose political conceits have consistently been
proved wrong. So why were Bush and his aides so keen to swallow Laurie
Mylroie's theories on Saddam and terrorism?
By Peter Bergen
Americans supported the war in Iraq not because Saddam Hussein was an evil
dictator - they knew that - but because President Bush made the case that
Saddam might hand weapons of mass destruction to his terrorist allies to
wreak havoc on the United States. In the absence of any evidence for that
theory, it's fair to ask: where did the administration's conviction come
from? It was at the American Enterprise Institute (www.aei.org) - a
conservative Washington DC thinktank - that the idea took shape that
overthrowing Saddam should be a goal. Among those associated with AEI is
Richard Perle, a key architect of the president's get-tough-on-Iraq policy,
and Paul Wolfowitz, now the number-two official at the Pentagon. But none of
the thinkers at AEI was in any real way an expert on Iraq. For that they
relied on someone you probably have never heard of: a woman named Laurie
Mylroie. http://www.benadorassociates.com/mylroie.php
http://www.benadorassociates.com/img/mylroie.jpg
Laurie Mylroie
Mylroie has credentials as an expert on the Middle East, national security
and, above all, Iraq, having held faculty positions at Harvard and the US
Naval War College. http://www.nwc.navy.mil/
During the 1980s she was an apologist for Saddam's regime, but became
anti-Saddam around the time of his invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
In the run-up to that Gulf war, with New York Times reporter Judith Miller
(http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Judith_Miller), Mylroie wrote
Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, a well-reviewed bestseller.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0812919211?v=glance
Judith Miller:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/images/terroristattack/july-dec01/web2.jpg
It was the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993 that launched
Mylroie's quixotic quest to prove that Saddam's regime was the chief source
of anti-US terrorism. She laid out her case in a 2000 book called Study of
Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America. Perle glowingly
blurbed the book as "splendid and wholly convincing". Wolfowitz and his then
wife, according to Mylroie, "provided crucial support".
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0844741272?v=glance
Mylroie believes that Saddam was behind every anti-American terrorist
incident of note in the past decade, from the levelling of the federal
building in Oklahoma City in 1995 to September 11 itself. She is, in short,
a cranky conspiracist - but her neoconservative friends believed her
theories, bringing her on as a terrorism consultant at the Pentagon.
The extent of Mylroie's influence is shown in the new book Against All
Enemies, by the veteran counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, in which
he recounts a senior-level meeting on terrorism months before September 11.
During that meeting Clarke quotes Wolfowitz as saying: "You give Bin Laden
too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on
New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed
to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist." Clarke writes: "I
could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was spouting the Laurie Mylroie
theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Centre, a
theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue."
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743260244?v=glance
Mylroie's influence can also be seen in the Bush cabinet's reaction to the
September 11 attacks. According to Bob Woodward's recent book, Plan of
Attack, Wolfowitz told the cabinet immediately after the attacks that there
was a 10 to 50% chance that Saddam was implicated. Around the same time,
Bush told his aides: "I believe that Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to
strike them now."
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/074325547X?v=glance
The most comprehensive criminal investigation in history - pursuing 500,000
leads and interviewing 175,000 people - has turned up no evidence of Iraqi
involvement.
How is it that key members of the Bush administration believed otherwise?
Mylroie, in Study of Revenge, claims to have discovered what everyone
missed: that the plot's mastermind, a man generally known by one of his many
aliases, "Ramzi Yousef", was actually an Iraqi intelligence agent. Some time
after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Mylroie argues, Yousef was given
access to the passport of a Pakistani named Abdul Basit whose family lived
in Kuwait, and assumed his identity. She reached this deduction following an
examination of Basit's passport records that indicated Yousef and Basit were
four inches different in height. But US investigators say that "Yousef" and
Basit are the same person, and that he is a Pakistani with ties to al-Qaida,
not to Iraq. Yousef's uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was al-Qaida's military
commander until his capture in Pakistan in 2003.
The reality is that by the mid-90s, the FBI, the CIA and the State
Department had found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the
first Trade Centre attack. Vincent Cannistraro, who headed the CIA's
counterterrorist centre in the early 90s, told me, "My view is that Laurie
has an obsession with trying to link Saddam to global terrorism. Years of
strenuous effort to prove the case have been unavailing." Ken Pollack, a
former CIA analyst and author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for
Invading Iraq, dismissed Mylroie's theories: "[The National Security
Council] had the intelligence community look very hard at the allegations
that the Iraqis were behind the 1993 Trade Centre attack ... The
intelligence community said there were no such links."
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375509283?v=glance
Neil Herman, the FBI official who headed the Trade Centre investigation,
explained that one of the lower-level conspirators, Abdul Rahman Yasin, did
flee New York to live with a family member in Baghdad: "The one glaring
connection that can't be overlooked is Yasin. We looked at that rather
extensively. There were no ties to the Iraqi government."
In July last year, Mylroie published a new book, Bush v the Beltway: How the
CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror. The book
charges that the US government suppressed information about Iraq's role in
anti-American terrorism, including the investigation of 9/11. It claims that
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the now captured mastermind of 9/11, is an Iraqi
intelligence agent who, like his nephew Ramzi Yousef, adopted the identity
of a Pakistani living in Kuwait.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060597267?v=glance&st=*
The US government doesn't seem to have explored this theory. Why not?
Mylroie explained to the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks: "A
senior administration official told me in specific that the question of the
identities of the terrorist masterminds could not be pursued because of
bureaucratic obstructionism." We are expected to believe that the Bush
administration could not find anyone to investigate supposed Iraqi links to
9/11, at the same time as 150,000 American soldiers were sent to fight a war
in Iraq.
Mylroie had only this comment when I asked about her research: "This issue
[of Iraq's involvement in anti-US terrorism] has become enormously
politicised. When I first wrote about it in 1995, major magazines and
newspapers and the Israeli ambassador commented positively on my research."
The only other chance I have had to talk with Mylroie came last February,
when we both appeared on Canadian television to discuss the impending war.
"Listen," she declared, "we're going to war because President Bush believes
Saddam was involved in 9/11. Al-Qaida is a front for Iraqi intelligence."
Towards the end of the interview, Mylroie became agitated, jabbing her
finger at the camera: "There is a very acute chance as we go to war that
Saddam will use biological agents against Americans, that there will be
anthrax in the US and smallpox in the US. Are you in Canada prepared for
Americans who have smallpox and do not know it crossing the border?"
Such hyperbole is emblematic of Mylroie's method. She has said that Terry
Nichols, one of the Oklahoma City plotters, was in league with Ramzi Yousef,
the supposed Iraqi agent. The federal judge who presided over the Oklahoma
case ruled this theory inadmissible. Mylroie implicates Iraq in the 1996
bombing of a US military facility in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 servicemen.
In 2001, a grand jury indicted members of Saudi Hezbollah, a group with ties
to Iran. Mylroie suggests that the attacks on US embassies in Africa in 1998
were "the work of Bin Laden and Iraq". An investigation uncovered no
connection. Mylroie has written that the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996 was
probably an Iraqi plot; a two-year investigation found it was an accident.
Saddam is guilty of many crimes, but there is no evidence linking him to any
act of anti-US terrorism for a decade, while there is a mountain of evidence
against al-Qaida.
Mylroie has also recently taken on the role of defender of Ahmed Chalabi,
the head of the Iraqi National Congress, who is accused of providing
fraudulent information about Iraq's WMD programme and passing intelligence
to Iran. In May, in the conservative newspaper the New York Sun, Mylroie
described Chalabi as the victim of a "longstanding grudge" by the CIA.
Mylroie's theories have bolstered the argument that led us into a costly war
in Iraq, and swayed key opinion-makers in the Bush administration, who in
turn persuaded Americans that the Iraqi dictator had a role in the 9/11
attacks. In November Mylroie told Newsweek: "I take satisfaction that we
went to war with Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein. The rest is details."
Now she tells us.
* Peter Bergen, a fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington DC and
adjunct professor, school of advanced international studies, Johns Hopkins
University, is the author of Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama
bin Laden.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4963365-103550,00.html